I would disagree that Sentinel's Fate was good... EQ2 started seriously dying after Kingdoms of Sky and that weird Asian themed Fallen Dynasty adventure pack. I played in a worldwide competing guild from release to around that time and saw a lot of weird changes along the way. But anything after that pretty much homogenized all classes and armor sets to cater towards a shrinking population. I can think of numerous top guilds that literally just stopped playing around this time.
Prior to that, the servers were full, raid targets were contested, fun, and challenging (Mutegenic Outcast dps race and Tarinax's swim strategy come to mind). The mix of contested and instanced dungeons was spot on imho. Long quest chains were fun (Prismatics / Qeynos Cutlass / etc.) and remained useful through expansions. In general, I believe the game was a brilliant meld of the EQ "neckbeard" and the WoW "casual" stereotypes. Basically, what a lot of us wanted was a game that extended on the lore of EQ while adding the QoL improvements that it lacked... I feel EQ2 delivered.
Some other fun things I think EQ2 got right:
- Any Class / Any Race (original style with betrayal quests)
- Tradeskilling (As someone who detests tradeskilling albeit)
- Meaningful mob con style
- Combat / Chains (some classes were completely better than their counterparts and
broke but the general feel of combat, especially soloing, was active and enjoyable)
*I will say that combat got out of hand towards the end of KoS (like 4 hotbars of spells as a dirge)
- Art style (I know this is a debatable subject but I liked the look of the game)
EQ2 really holds a special place in my heart. As SirAlvarex said "EQ2 is still probably my favorite game of all time. EQ my most memorable." Sadly, as been mentioned Smokejumper was a complete mess and pushed F2P / Cash Shop bullshit on the server and completely neglected his loyal player base to hopefully bring in new players (it didnt). I hop on the game from time to time just to visit the old toons but the game is a heaping mess... it's unrecognizable.
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